STUDY OF THE SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS RELATED TO HEALTH AND CLIMATE VARIABILITY/CHANGE IN SOUTH AMERICA

LOPEZ MARÍA SOLEDAD; GABRIELA MÜLLER; MARÍA S. LÓPEZ, WALTER SIONE, GERARDO C. LEYNAUD, YANINA A. PRIETO, AND ADRIANA S. MANZANO; GOTTIG MICAELA

Simposio; SELPER 2016; 2016

The planet´s climate has experienced significant variations over the past 150 years as evidencedin temperature changes that have led to a warmer global climate, altered rainfall patterns and ahigher frequency of extreme events. Global climate change affects the functioning of manyecosystems and the species inhabiting them. Additionally, it has an impacts on human healthbeing able to change the frequency of infectious diseases and epidemic outbreaks.Nonetheless, epidemiological studies have indicated difficulties in estimating the role thatclimate plays in health changes. Most of the literature lacks concrete evidence of climate impacton vector-borne diseases. Therefore, this work aims to perform a literature review in order to: a)determine the diseases associated with climate change that have been extensively reviewed inSouth America, b) determine how climate affects these diseases and their vectors or reservoirs,and c) analyze the distribution and abundance of publications related to Health and ClimateVariability and Climate Change in South America.In this framework, a systematic review of the literature published was conducted, identifying,evaluating and summarizing scientific papers available in Scielo, Pubmed and Lilacs databases.The literature search was performed including these diseases, which are the most representativeones in South America, combined with other terms.The country with the largest number of published papers and presence of all disease types wasBrazil, followed by Colombia and Argentina. The diseases and/or vectors most largely studiedwere: leishmaniasis, dengue and malaria. The climate variables most studied in relation to thediseases were precipitation and temperature. The diseases with greater geographical distributionof scientific papers were: chagas, malaria, leishmaniasis, and dengue.This work applied a rather uncommon method for literature review: a spatial representationof study areas addressed in scientific studies, and the analysis of their spatial distribution for thedetection of geographic regions with lack of information. This method turned out to be very effective to compare the distribution of publications for each disease, also to compare them withclimate and disease distribution maps.